@InProceedings{su-EtAl:2018:N18-2,
  author    = {Su, Shang-Yu  and  Lo, Kai-Ling  and  Yeh, Yi Ting  and  Chen, Yun-Nung},
  title     = {Natural Language Generation by Hierarchical Decoding with Linguistic Patterns},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {New Orleans, Louisiana},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {61--66},
  abstract  = {Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in spoken dialogue systems. Classic NLG can be divided into two phases: (1) sentence planning: deciding on the overall sentence structure, (2) surface realization: determining specific word forms and flattening the sentence structure into a string. Many simple NLG models are based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, which basically contains a encoder-decoder structure; these NLG models generate sentences from scratch by jointly optimizing sentence planning and surface realization using a simple cross entropy loss training criterion. However, the simple encoder-decoder architecture usually suffers from generating complex and long sentences, because the decoder has to learn all grammar and diction knowledge. This paper introduces a hierarchical decoding NLG model based on linguistic patterns in different levels, and shows that the proposed method outperforms the traditional one with a smaller model size. Furthermore, the design of the hierarchical decoding is flexible and easily-extendible in various NLG systems.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N18-2010}
}